Civil Rights and the Louisiana Library Association: Stumbling toward Integration

The twentieth-century civil rights movement had a profound impact on the Louisiana Library Association (LLA). In the 1940s and 1950s, the association made halting attempts to end professional segregation and grant equal rights to African American librarians, but these ultimately failed. Pressure from the American Library Association in the 1960s could not achieve integration either, and the two organizations severed their ties from 1962 to 1965. Ultimately, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided the greatest motivation to integrate by invalidating the cultural and legal institutions of Jim Crow.